Product Central

Dispatches from the Reviews Editor

Charles McLellan

Hello, I'm the Reviews Editor at ZDNet UK. My experience with computers started at London's Imperial College, where I studied Zoology and then Environmental Technology. This was sufficiently long ago (mid-1970s) that Fortran, IBM punched-card machines and mainframes were involved, followed by green-screen terminals and eventually the personal computers we know and (mostly) love.
After doing post-grad research at Imperial for a while, I got involved in helping to produce a weekly news magazine based in Amsterdam. This was in the mid-1980s, and one of my duties was to set up data communications links with technologically-challenged national newspaper journalists in a number of European cities via a 300-baud modem and an acoustic coupler. Tech support people have my sympathy!
I've been in computer publishing since the late 1980s, starting with Reed Business Publishing's Practical Computing, then joining Ziff Davis in 1991 to help launch PC Magazine UK as Production Editor. After a couple of years I switched to commissioning, editing and writing, becoming a Technical Editor and then First Looks Editor.
When ZDNet came looking for a Reviews Editor in 2000, I was ready to make the move from print to online — just in time for the dot-com crash! It's been a long road from punched cards to the cloud, but it'll still be fun seeing where we go from here.

Latest Posts

We've just reviewed our second Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), the R2H from ASUS. In case you'd forgotten, the UMPC caused something of a stir back in February/March when Microsoft ran a teaser campaign for Origami (Redmond's codename for what turned out to be the UMPC) — a small slate-style Tablet PC running Windows XP.

Today's the day when the tech media's guns point towards Redmond and fire a triple salvo at Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. ZDNet UK, of course, is weighing in -- as I write this, the Office 2007 Special Report is live, and the Vista and Exchange ones are imminent.

'Only the paranoid survive' is the title of a book by ex-Intel boss Andrew Grove, but it would also make an apt marketing slogan for network appliance maker Chronicle Solutions.The company develops what it calls 'content capturing solutions' for enterprises and government agenices that need to keep close tabs on what's happening on their networks.

As a one-time Production Editor in the olde worlde of print, I was pleased to see Kim Fletcher's article in today's Media Guardian, entitled 'In praise of the subeditor'. He deftly explains the ancient rivalry between free-ranging journalists and office-bound production staff (including the 'subs') who turn the former's often semi-literate and error-strewn efforts into polished, reader-friendly product.

So Microsoft's Vista desktop OS has finally been released to manufacturing (RTM). Thank goodness for that, many will say: although we've assiduously covered the many pre-release versions, there are probably only so many Vista previews one can take.

If you study the specifications of the recently released Core 2 Duo-based Apple MacBook Pro, you may be puzzled by the quoted RAM limit of 3GB. The notebook has a pair of DIMM slots that can accommodate 2GB modules, while the Intel 945PM chipset -- which this MacBook Pro model uses -- can handle 4GB of RAM.

Firefox 2 is generating plenty of coverage across the Net, including our own review and shoot-out versus IE 7. Now the new ZDNet's bloggers are getting in on the act: check out David's detailed post on the subject.

As the dust settles on the ZDNet editorial floor, and the takeaway wrappers, pizza boxes, Coke tins and other detritus are swept up following a weekend of controlled but frenzied pre-launch activity, thoughts return to the day job. In my case, that's feeding the Reviews channel with exciting content.

You are now looking at the all-new ZDNet UK, and although the paint may be a bit wet in places, we think it's a massive improvement on what went before. We'll touch up any bits we missed in the days and weeks to come.

Trawling through the 100th handheld spec sheet while carrying out the teethgrindly-dull-but-necessary task called 'data cleansing' prior to our exciting new launch, I couldn't help noticing that SiRF seems to have the handheld-integrated GPS market well and truly sewn up. If a PDA has a GPS inside, it's almost certainly a SiRFstar III.

A Korean scientist's commendable but misguided attempt to stem the tide of species extinction by cloning the distinctly deceased woolly mammoth has been frozen in its tracks, report our friends at The Reg.Not only did Hwang Woo-Suk buy his frozen mammoth tissue from the Russian mafia, but -- the cad -- he falsified his expense claim, putting the Pleistocene pemmican down as 'money for cows for experiment'.